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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26332600">Bobby McGee</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sassaphrass/pseuds/Sassaphrass'>Sassaphrass</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Umbrella Academy (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Depression, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Luther Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Mental Health Issues, Self Harm, and the future ain’t that great, back to the future - Freeform</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 13:27:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,185</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26332600</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sassaphrass/pseuds/Sassaphrass</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>For Luther living in 1961 had been a comfortable unhappiness. </p><p>It was easier when there was nothing left to lose.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Luther Hargreeves &amp; Everyone</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>54</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Bobby McGee</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>At some point being alive stopped hurting so much. 1962 was a comfortable unhappiness. It didn’t feel like being alive was such a terrible effort just to stay in one place, and he wasn’t alone anymore. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He had Jack, and the girls in the club. People knew him. People liked him. He knew what to say and when to say it and most of the time people didn’t expect him to talk much. It had been such a goddamn relief to know what to say. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It was like being home except without the constant fear of Dad’s disappointment hanging over his head. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>It hurt thinking he had lost everyone and everything he’d ever loved but there was also a relief because none of it mattered anymore, nothing he’d done, nothing that had been done to him. It hadn’t happened yet. It’s such a goddamn relief not having anything left to care about, not having to care about anything. Not having to hurt. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to loose. </span>
  </em>
</p><p>
  <em>
    <span>Nothing ain’t worth nothing but it’s free </span>
  </em>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>(Had that song come out yet?)</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>That was Luther, he had nothing but in a lot of ways that made him free. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Then Five comes back and finds him and tells him the world is going to end, and Luther intends to stay out of it he really had, but then he’d seen Vanya and all things considered he owed her an apology, and he anticipated she’d want to stay out of things anyway, and…..well, </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Suddenly he has a lot left to lose and he loses a lot of it. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Then they get things back that they all had thought were lost for good, except it’s not there’s any more. Not their home. Not their brother. Not their dad. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They hole up somewhere that might once have been Vanya’s old place, and also equally might use be an empty apartment that they’ve broken into. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Luther misses Elliot. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He misses living alone. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He misses having the right words, and having a space in the world where he fit. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Diego has been keeping an eye on him sympathetically, which is weird. Five had been scowling. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Luther falls into old habits without noticing. He slaps his forearms when the world starts getting foggy, just enough to hurt, not enough to bruise. When that doesn’t work he sometimes punches himself in the bicep or shoulders. He never leaves a mark. HE tries to tell himself it doesn’t really count. Half the time he does it without even thinking. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He’s just trying to clear his head; wake himself up when he’s having trouuble focusing. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Then one day he’s talking to Allison on the phone. She’s off in search of Claire, who may or may not exist in this timeline, and he’s trying not to beg her to come back, because he may need her but she’s never needed him and besides Claire definitely needs her more, when he realizes he’s been worrying the skin at his wrist without thinking about it, pinching and pulling and hurting himself just a bit without noticing.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>That’s not a good sign. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Five doesn’t know what to do. None of them do. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Sometimes, on days Luther has learned to recognize are bad, he wishes the world really had ended.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Sometimes, on worse days, Luther desperately misses the moon. Sometimes, on those days, he hurt himself just a bit on purpose. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Living hurts again. HE misses Dad, and Pogo. He misses Jack, and his dog and the girls at the Carousel. He misses being King Kong and having somewhere that didn’t make him feel like a freak, and somewhere he could get punched in the face if he needed to be. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He doesn’t mention it to anyone. After all, everyone else had left people they loved behind. Vanya had left Sissy, Klaus had left Dave and his cult and lost Ben for good this time, Diego had apparently been in love with that Lila chick, and Allison had had to say goodbye to her husband, probably forever. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>So Luther had lost some friends, big deal. Everyone had. He wasn’t special. He was just weak that he couldn’t handle it when everyone else who’d lost more somehow managed to. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Klaus was planning on dropping in on his cult to see if there was a way to get some money out of them. Luther suspects that having their glorious prophet return on the day after his predicted Armageddon will probably be sufficiently dramatic to shake some sort of money loose, but what did he know?</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Five is muttering and back to doing long-ass equations on the walls, probably trying to figure out if they can fix the time stream without potentially triggering a third Apocalypse (Luther is putting money on ‘NO’ for that one). </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>They’re starting to drift apart all over again. Vanya’s picked the violin back up, and is trying to make some money teaching kids. Diego’s trying to track down that police officer Chacha and Hazel killed to see if he’s still wanted for her murder or if by stopping the apocalypse they’ve also somehow saved her life. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Luther isn’t doing anything. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He’s getting bad again. Like after he first landed in 1961, after what Dad said. Back around the time Ruby scraped him off the pavement and fussed over him and gave him something to be other than a deformed disgusting failure. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He wonders sometimes, if he got a good grip on one of himself, whether he could physically tear himself apart. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He’s pretty sure he could snap his own wrist so long as he didn’t hesitate.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He doesn’t because that would be fucked up beyound what even his family could ignore and the idea of having to explain why he’d ever do something so stupid make him want to cry. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Not to mention that if nothing else that year in the past had cemented in Luther’s mind exactly what he was good for and he wasn’t going to be so selfish as to take himself out of commission when being good in a fight was literally the only thing he had to offer the family. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The ones still in town meet up at least once a week to go over the updates from the one’s who are out of town and to try and figure out some way of moving forward. Luther doesn’t engage much. Tries to cook snacks so they’ll want to come back, and tries not to seem as pathetically desperate for them not to move on from each other again. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>He wonders sometimes if he could buy laughing gas online somewhere. He drinks a lot. There’s always booze around the apartment between Five and him. Vanya doesn’t drink much, and she’s been talking about getting a place of her own which had prompted Five to have something of a meltdown about safety precautions, so they haven’t brought that back up. Five can be a mean drunk sometimes, though usually alcohol makes him a much more delightful version of himself. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Luther is a happy drunk. These days it’s the only time he’s happy. </span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Title and quote in story is from the song “Me and Bobby McGee” written by Kris Kristofferson and first released in 1969. </p><p>I hope Luther’s very obvious depression and self destructive habits will be addressed more directly in season 3. This is just something I wrote post-season because in some ways it seems like Luther was doing a lot better and had a better support system in 1962 than at any other point in his life, which is just real real sad man. </p><p>I don’t know if anyone else is interested but I thought I’d put it out there.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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